Guild Wars 2

Passive play should not be rewarded. I would be fine with spirit weapons actually being removed from the game, rather than being “fixed”, along with the removal of spirits and minions.

Guardians need better balancing on their dps and non existent condition build so that they can leave the bunker pigeonholed role they have in PVP. What they don’t need is to become another petting zoo class.

Try to kill the pack of mobs after the tunnel in the molten fractal @50 without using any blind, any cc, any damage mitigation. Try it. I dare you talk about how CC is useless after this. In fact it’s my main pet peeve in pugs when I see warriors camp their gs and not use mace 5 etc.

deSade.9437:

/reminding you all that they claim a single dungeon run or a fractal should take about 30 minutes so apparently they’re working on it

It would be fine.. if dungeon bosses had any noteworthy mechanics, which isn’t really the case. Things like the Grawl and Archdiviner in fractals were a really good start in terms of introducing bosses that aren’t just a damage sponge and that are fun, long duration fights that aren’t one shotted even in solid groups. Making dungeon runs slower without taking a lesson from FOTM wouldn’t be good. I wouldn’t even think to pug a dungeon like HotW post nerf, doing HotW level of sponge in a non optimized group will feel like poking your own eyeballs out since that dungeon is the very incarnation of boredom in computer game form. Doing ginva in pugs already feels like a chore more than playing a video game.

AC is one of the dungeons that would actually benefit from slower kills though. Most of the pugs who stack on the column without avoiding his attacks at all (they stack there so that they don’t get knocked back when they get hit after all) will end up dying once the supportive abilities and heals are down and they will finally have to learn how to fight Rumblus properly in the open. And the fights in the revamped AC are decently fun.

Talking about fractals, thaumanova is such a shame. It had a nice concept but the execution is a fail. The end boss doesn’t have enough mechanics apart from the destruction of platform and his HP and defenses are low enough that he’s one shotted in solid damage parties. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who made grawl and archy left anet before they made the new fractals.

IrisTheCasual.3742:

When a fractal run was smooth and extremely pleasant, it is only reasonable to be genuinely happy for others’ hefty rewards.

For a 49 pug the chemistry was remarkably high. A Mai Trin where everyone stacked on her from beginning to end with almost no interruption? a grawl with elemental phases burned so fast reflects are still up by the time it’s done? 10/10 would pug again.

Wethospu.6437:

Perhaps… wait for it…. people are having fun with skips and stuff?

No, that can’t be it. How could it be fun to skip content that gives you nothing. Fun is about doing pointless things. Or at least that’s what “fun” means in the playasyouwant brigade.

Funnily enough, when you play games like D3 you actually go out of your way to clear all the elite packs on the map. There, the expectation for loot is radically different.

I ain’t going to clear trash for a couple white and blues.

When it comes to pvp/wvwvw the reality is that guardian is one of the classes with the lowest amount of build variety. You can do decently as a medit dps guardian but that only really works either against bad players, or when you’re lucky in the “paper rock scissor” draw (I found it strong against pw thieves), the truth is, dps guardian is like a subpar pw thief in terms of the role it occupies, it’s almost as glassy (it doesn’t do well in team fights / when surrounded by lots of aoe), but doesn’t have the same mobility on the map nor can it disengage at will from a fight that is perceived as lost. While the thief can flee when things turn sour, guardian has to die. As soon as anything turns into a 1vs2 against equally competent players you will die, you just can’t disengage from a fight the way a thief or warrior would do. The ranged options are also rather lacking.

Guardian is mostly viable as a bunker and not much else. Most classes have access to good condition builds (warrior, engineer, necromancer, mesmer, ranger, all have decent condition builds) but guardian for some god forsaken reason is not supposed to have access to conditions. Guardian as a dps is very glassy but doesn’t have the mobility of a war and thief to justify it.

Giving guardian traits that have to do with either condi damage or burn is ridiculous when the class doesn’t even have a good condi based weapon set and utilities! what are those traits supposed to do without the required framework to stand on.

As good as bunker guardians are in their role, I don’t really feel it fair for a class to be pigeonholed that much into one, singular, and also, the most boring role in this game.

obal.3218:

I usually only have one shout on my bar at a time so I don’t think soldier runes are that worthwhile.

So much this. Shouts are situational and it’s never close to optimal to have three shout on your bar. And when you only have one, and selected it for a specific context, you’re not going to spam it for cond removal either. If you need stand your ground you’re not going to spam it for cond removal. If you need retreat you’re going to use it to block a boss while looking at his tell, not for cond removal. Or Save Yourselves as a way to gain higher burst (Power of the Virtuous) for fights that don’t require much support on your bar.
I think that players who believe conditions to be that much of a problem (?) should try mesmers. Mesmers don’t have to handicap themselves as much to provide strong party wide removal.

You could use ruby orbs as a placeholder while waiting for the new runes, that would still be better than running soldier. Soldier Runes aren’t an actual crutch, they’re more like a placebo. The whole idea of using shouts as condition removal really set back guardians builds when everyone was still running things like PoV and 30 in honor. Guardians play a lot better when you realize it’s a placebo and there is stronger support to be had without going with a shout bar.

Nothing is funnier than an honest opinion expressed through an innocent lapsus.

Terravos.4059:

Don’t worry about Counter play on Striders Defense

Because no one is going to use that god awful trait in the first place.

Most of the new traits don’t really have a place in any builds. The worst offender imho being guardian because most classes have at least one trait that could be situationally useful, but the 5 new guardian traits are just horribly bad. Not even mentioning the condi traits (still introducing condi traits for a class that doesn’t have solid condi application? change the weapons and utils before you change the traits), but I don’t see anyone ever picking FoW over PoV in Honor, or PoB over Indomitable or Shielded Mind. As for communal, it’s in a terrible trait line whose only two traits justifying a 30 point investment are either full medit build or AH. “I’m going to pick 30 in valor for communal” said no one ever.

A lot of traits introduced in one patch but most of it is garbage.

I wouldn’t worry about any of the traits they are going to introduce. They aren’t going to be used in good builds at all. Apart from maybe the mesmer traits.

They made horrible decisions like making conditions check your cond damage stat all the time, rather than having a fixed amount of damage once applied. So, let’s say, you stack 25 bleed on something (and stop applying more cond) those cond you applied still check your char all the time and their damage will change accordingly to your cond damage stat (for eg if your might stacks drop or go up).
Their implementation is stressful to servers actually. Without the cap they’d really implode fast on open world events.

The way condition damage is implemented in this game is horribly broken and beyond a simple fix. Just like so many things.

If you want a game where killing trash is rewarding, uninstall. Heck, if you want a game that has any sort of fun loot mechanism where you can get drops you can actually use on your character from time to time, this isn’t it either. This game is about farming gold, buying mat, playing TP. This isn’t the game where doing dungeons will get you gear drops you can actually use, or might want to trade with the rest of the party. 99% loot is complete salvage loot. And the few things that aren’t complete salvage loot can’t be traded (fractal skins, ascended boxes, some of the fractal exotics too) and have horrible rng with almost no expectation of getting something that can be used. GW2 is one of the worst skinner box I met. It’s just not working.

Since the highest rewards from doing dungeons come from gold and token, anything that can be skipped should in fact be skipped.

Since patch 2.x even Diablo 3 has a better loot mechanism than gw2, and it was completely broken at release. That says a lot about GW2 and loot.

There is nothing that can fix the issue sort of a gigantic game wide overhaul because let’s say if they made it impossible to skip trash in any of the dungeons, people would just stop running them altogether. Or even stop playing the game for many cases. Because that would introduce a stick, while missing the carrot. This game doesn’t have a lot to look forward to, most of it is just a gold grind economy with end game 100% based on crafting.

http://dulfy.net/2014/03/21/gw2-ready-up-episode-8-developer-livestream/

Dem guardian traits.

hendo.1940:

CC exists in this game, it’s just your average player is going to be pointlessly smashing their control skills.

When people say there is no CC in this game they mean they really want to stunlock everything on their hambow war spamming all buttons the way they do in PVP/wvwvw. If it’s not complete constant stunlock easy mode then it’s not CC.

Extensions tend to feature more meaningful content like new dungeons/raid rather than living story open world zerglings.

kyubi.3620:

Having fun with my minion master necro in fractals lvl 30+… its just lovely how easy the imbued shaman becomes with this many pet poking at his shield.

One, only one player poking at his shield with some autoattack is enough to destroy the shield. On the other hand, your minions will almost insta die after a couple AoE and you have no utilities to actually bring while you slot things like minion in. Good job! Minion OP.

Actually, condi necros are more useful than you are. That’s pretty sad.

Mai Trin cannon phase is all about killing the players you hate the most by running in circle around them to spawn moar AoE. Best PVP (better than pvdoor and bunker wars) in the game, close call with CoE p2 golems.

We need a “made his party die” leaderboard.

dutchiez.7502:

Sins.4782:

I think the more interesting question is why he gives Ascalonian Tears from his bag of wondrous goods drop.

Because they probably just copy-pasted the AC troll and changed his model/colour.

Copy pasting things left and right sounds just about the amount of work they are willing to do to their dungeons.

Soule’s music started sounding same-ey ever since he did Morrowind. MorrowindIsNeverwinterNightsisOblivionisSkyrimisGuildWars. Compare those I just cited here to the creativity he has shown on the Icewind Dale and Total Annihilation soundtracks and it’s just obvious the guy stopped caring. The music from the video linked in southsun made me feel like it was straightly copied from Morrowind at first.

To those who say there are no healers in this game, it’s not even true. They’re just not needed. A fully heal built guardian can give a full heal to the whole group every 20 sec or so by combining all their AoE heals, regen, symbols etc. It requires stacking (oh the humanity!) so it might not be to the taste of the actual play as you want who would prefer to run around like headless chicken more.

Healers aren’t needed but if you complain that there is no class that can heal then it’s wrong. There are no real tanks though, since the basic premise of tanking is taking hits so that other people don’t take hits, which doesn’t work without a concept of controlled aggro. Healers do exist, and dramatically change the gameplay since you can pretty much watch tv while doing dungeons if you intend to play that way.

But when it comes to healing this game is actually over the top and you should watch dub’s videos of facetanking lupi with dodge key unbound to understand the kind of monster you want to unleash. If anything healing builds need a nerf.

Turgut.4397:

Even GW1 had a class purely for healing, which meant problems in missions/dungons were solved and your entire team didn’t have to suffer the dreaded ‘wipe’ every 4 seconds because of the lack of an aggro system. There is no dedicated healing class in this game, which means 2 things in PvE:

If you suffer from wipes every 4 seconds it’s a PEBKAC not a problem with the game.

Dual.8953:

If dungeons didn’t have rewards, would people care about efficiency in them? How would it effect the PvE community?

I would never touch that hypothetical version of the game even with a ten foot pole. So basically you take the only fun part of PVE and make it give zero reward, forcing you to do terribly boring content to get anything at all ? this would be the last nail in the coffin for this game. If dungeons didn’t give rewards, why even play this game anymore. So that you can join open world zerg to press 111 with occasion V key ?

If dungeons didn’t give rewards, it’s not that I would stop caring about the efficiency (I wouldn’t), I would just stop caring about this game at all. I already am half-way there after all. It is very hard indeed to find the care to log what with DS2 and the D3 revamps.

layzoe.6035:

AC is quite difficult due to the fact the Queen Spider is a wipe for most parties that don’t know how to mitigate the damage. You have to stack in a certain corner and do not move one bit otherwise you trigger her deadly lethal poison.

Another “melee is harder than ranged” on spider queen ?

Here is a video of a guy soloing her at range on a low level engineer :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzGEbPoXw1c

Her most dangerous attacks can’t even hit you at long ranges (the immobilize/webbing which deals some serious damage). The only thing you have to dodge are the poison fields and they are far from being instant kill fields. That engie in the video kept running over them with his rifle and elixir gun moves.

You don’t need to stack, if anything, stacking with a bunch of low dps low level characters is going to be much harder.

To be honest, I only use focus 4 for vuln stacking, I can’t remember a single time where I felt I needed more cond removal than what virtue and purging brings.

And really, if the game were to introduce something that truly requires something close to a cond removal spam, Mesmers would probably be the better class to bring for this purpose. They could do that without even losing out on things like reflect and they’d still keep a third utility free for other purposes to boot.

Sars.8792:

Chaith.8256:

Wintel.4873:

Killing a treb with a 3 minute CD elite is fine.
As for one-shotting players…sorry what? If you’re referring to Rush + Lightning Flash trick, the AoE is absolutely tiny. If the target even moves a few inches they will be out of it, moving targets are out of the question (and everyone is always moving). Whoever dies to FGS should feel bad.

You are missing a few key facts about GW2 PvP.

#1.

Downed Bodies don’t move that much. Neither do the people reviving them until it’s too late. When someone dunks a downed body with the PISTOL WHIP, there are going to be tons of frustrated players. This is a fact. Thank god there are so many THIEVES that are coordinated (lol) enough to do this, it is quite common. It pretty much took THIEVES becoming a FOTM profession where there are 2 per team in order to recognize that this is a VERY dangerous mechanic and should be tweaked.

am i doing it right?

Did you seriously compare pistol whip damage to a blinked fiery rush?

FGS should be fixed before they fix elementalist as a whole. The class is currently in a bad state but if it ever became stronger in TPVP you’d see more FGS abuse on downed bodies and that one particular skill could turn out to be as much cancer as any of the other terribads things about this game PVP.

Shockwave.1230:

The FGS is used as part of Dungeon speed runs and destroying objects quickly in WvW and sPvP. They are significant parts of the game, and would have been dealt with if it were a bug. While you claim it’s a bug, other people claim it’s a feature.

FGS is the single most overpowered skill in PVE. If you’re going to mention PVE there’s even more reason there to nerf it than in PVP. Literally the corner stone of any speedrun is stacking ele with FGS and pressing 4 in corners. So great, much gameplay, wow. This isn’t to say I never used FGS in PVE, I did, but it’s not my job to balance the game, it’s anet’s. I’ll play whatever is most efficient, it’s not the player’s job to kitten himself with subpar specs or group compositions, it’s anet’s job to do something about overpowered skills. FGS deals absolutely abnormal damage and you’d have to be seriously blind to think fiery rush has any place in a balanced game. This game PVE is a serious joke when literally any dungeon boss (fractals not included) melts in under 3 seconds from a party’s worth of FGS spam.

This list of special elite mob abilities you see in diablo 3 is what should’ve been suggested in the CDI as a model for higher difficulties to replace the rather dumb, predictable, constant that are fractal instabilities :

Arcane Enchanted: Arcane enchanted monsters summon rotating beams of arcane energy which deal significant damage.
Avenger: Monsters with the avenger affix grow in power as other monsters in their group are slain — they can increase in damage, attack speed, total life, and other attributes.
Desecrator: Desecrator monsters conjure burning pools of hellfire beneath your feet. These pools surge after a few seconds, dealing immense damage if you don’t move quickly to avoid them.
Electrified: Electrified monsters release bolts of electricity when struck, causing lightning damage on contact.
Extra Health: Monsters with extra health have substantially more Life (and, hence, survivability) than normal for monsters of their type.
Fast: Fast monsters move and attack much more quickly than their normal counterparts. They excel at chasing you down when you’re wounded and use their increased speed to move around the battlefield.
Fire Chains: These monsters are linked together by chains of fire that burn anything they touch. Killing individual monsters in the group limits the length and mobility of the chain.
Frozen: Frozen monsters fill the air around them with exploding ice crystals. These explosions deal cold damage, slow, and freeze heroes caught in their blast radius.
Frozen Pulse: Monsters with the frozen pulse affix summon an icy sphere that deals heavy damage over time while it moves across the battlefield.
Health Link: Monsters with health link share damage and Life pools. Any damage dealt to an individual is split among all members of a group.
Horde: Hordes of monsters don’t gain any particular abilities, but groups with the horde affix are larger than normal for their type.
Illusionist: Illusionist monsters create duplicates of themselves; these duplicates can deal damage while obscuring your true target.
Jailer: Monsters with the jailer affix can encase you in a prison, damaging and temporarily immobilizing you. You are vulnerable to attack while immobilized, but you can escape by using certain defensive skills.
Knockback: Successful hits from monsters with knockback send you flying away from them, interrupting your attack and slowing your movement.
Missile Dampening: Missile dampening monsters project an aura that slows your incoming projectiles, making ranged attacks less effective.
Molten: Molten monsters trail burning lava wherever they walk. Shortly after they die, their bodies explode into high-damage gouts of fire.
Mortar: Monsters with the mortar affix lob volatile globes of fire that can deal extreme damage to you at range. Move close to avoid their attacks.
Nightmarish: Successful attacks from nightmarish monsters can cause you to lose control of your character and flee for a few seconds.
Orbiter: Orbiter monsters are able to cover entire areas in an array of electric balls. These balls electrocute anything they touch.
Plagued: Plagued monsters leave toxic puddles in their footsteps. Standing in these puddles – even to attack the plagued – will deal increasing amounts of poison damage.
Reflect Damage: Monsters with this affix deal a portion of the damage they take back to their attackers. Their reflection power turns on and off over time, but you’ll be able to tell that it’s active if you keep an eye on them.
Shielding: Shielding monsters can conjure a temporary magic shield that makes them immune to damage.
Teleporter: Monsters with the teleporter affix can disappear and reappear in different locations on the screen at will, both to make surprise attacks and to escape.
Thunderstorm: Monsters with the thunderstorm affix use potent lightning strikes to shock enemies from a distance.
Vampiric: Vampiric monsters feed off of your injuries. They recover a portion of all damage they deal as Life.
Vortex: Monsters with the vortex affix can pull you towards them, interrupting your attacks and keeping you dangerously close.
Waller: Monsters with the waller affix create walls that can trap you or block your path to the monster summoning them. Summoned walls will vanish after a few seconds – if you can afford to wait.

No one would complain about the boredom in this game if mobs could spawn with a whole set of Arcane Frozen Waller Vortex. It would also make the trash mobs actually fun to fight against.
Also make it random so that we actually have to deal with the mechanics rather than just chose faceroll lvl “gearcheck agony” to avoid them all. Give them the ability to stack up, like d3’s elite mobs, that can have up to 4 of said affix, rather than just one singled out instability. Threads about stacking would die and the same people who complained about stacking will also give us delicious tears against the new mechanics.

mooty.4560:

I could be wrong but I tend to believe that most of the player base in GW2 is only hanging around because the MMO industry is stagnant. Players are clinging to GW2 because they enjoy MMOs and “what else is there?” ..decade old WoW? swiftly declining LotRO? dead and nearly decade old GW1? Eve?(takes a unique person) etc. There’s nothing much out there right at the moment. This could all change soon with releases like Wildstar, ESO and Destiny. So with that in mind I think Arenanet really needs to get a move on with expanded content and I can only hope it makes the game more interesting as a whole.

/thread

You nailed it. The mmo market doesn’t have a lot of good new stuff at the moment so veterans of the genre will pretty much have a choice between playing decade old games or outright not playing any mmo. GW2 can fill that gap a little but any decent player will soon be fed up by the lack of instanced content (open world zerg is NO replacement for real pve content), the inane state of PVP etc. And you can only run so much fractal and arah before thinking “what the hell am I doing there?”. Content like scarlet does not replace dungeons and raid. Not even a little. And the grind in this game is horrendous without any real reward for it apart from unlocking higher levels of fractal which are just more of the same (well, except that we didn’t actually unlock the higher levels yet, thanks obama). I actually can enjoy a grindy game when you can feel a sense of progressing into new content (like higher torment level in D3 or new raids in WoW) but gw2 is not it. It has the grind, without the content, without the purpose and introduced in such a way that everything is really tied to Gold/currency and you don’t get good drops. In grindy games you’ll get upgrades to your gear pretty often from drops, the likelihood of getting an actual gear upgrade in gw2 is close to zero because most of the stats combo are useless so even if you manage to get incredibly lucky and drop an ascended box chances are it’s worthless. You lose the sense of purpose you have for completing content by randomly getting good stuff that keeps you playing in that skinner box. You never get good drops in this game, instead you grind the gold and buy mat.

Thankfully the gap is filled with solo with coop games for me. The last big update to diablo 3 fixed every single gripe I had about the game, the extension is coming soon too and Dark Souls 2 just got released. Really strong month for that stuff.

Any healer is a bad healer since there are no healing role in this game and the range of heal/blastfinishers/boons is quite limited so in a group that would actually require someone to babysit them it usually wouldn’t work because the type of player who needs babysitting will also not stand close in melee range but play headless chicken game. You can’t actually target a player for anything in this game. Heck even in tpvp the cleric gear is mostly used for yourself as the point bunker rather than with the idea of “healing” your team. You’re not a healer, you’re never a healer, and if you think this game allows you to actually play a healer you’re sadly mistaken. Healer doesn’t even mean anything without a tank it’s not like you can make a team with a healer and a full berserker player and expect the healer to protect and heal a bad berserker who doesn’t dodge. The berserker will still die if he doesn’t dodge. There is no amount of external healing that can prevent a berserker from being one/two shot from things. Ergo if you feel comfortable playing berserker you will not benefit from a supposed “healer” in the party. And if you’re not comfortable you will still die even with said healer in the group. Can the healer tank lupicus’s kick for me? apart from giving aegis but berserker guardian still gives aegis just fine.

Roles in this game are support (control, reflects, boons), offensive buffing and dps, none of which are defined by gear unless you include the mostly useless boon duration runes. The only thing gear does is change the slider of comfortability with the content you have, with the more comfortable you are, the glassier you’ll play.

Most action games are like this. Dark Souls feature tankier gear and stat selections, but you can finish the game at lvl 1 (zero levelling) with an upgraded club if you know what you’re doing. Ultimately points in vitality and endurance are only there to make the game easier for you. But people coming to gw2 act like they expected a game like WoW. This isn’t WoW, and if you want WoW you should know where to look at.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

No, I want to understand encounters the first time. I want clear mechanics, clear tells, fair challenge. Case in point, basically every boss in Demons Souls or Dark Souls. Challenging, but completely clear in both mechanics and moves.

We haven’t played the same game have we. I love Dark Souls but it’s a stretch to pretend that it is any better than gw2 when it comes to being clear about mechanics.
A new player doing the Capra Demon for the first time will irremediably die unless he’s wearing high poise gear simply because there is literally a 2 seconds time to react to the encounter right after you entered the room and there was nothing to prepare you for what was about to unfold. The game is filled with surprise buttsecks like this.

Dark Souls has much more fun fights than GW2, even trash mobs are better but the game isn’t superior when it comes to teaching the player how to play it. Where it shines though is that even regular mobs behave like a player : they can block, they can evade, and they can even parry so if you’re one of these constant skill spammer you see in GW2 who keep spamming all the skills in their bar you’re in for a bad time because this isn’t a game where any of the content can be completed by mashing the one button and the first skeleton mobs you encounter are going to shred you. Dark Souls is what GW2 would be if all trash mobs were a bit more like the Heart of the Mists training class NPCs but with an actually decent AI.

Neural.1824:

Vargamonth.2047:

Part of being a decent player is also about maximizing your chances of success.

Actually, your comments seem to be more about other players maximizing your chance of success.

GW2 is the only mmo where statements like these can be pronounced without ridicule following. This game needs instanced content, /inspect and all the things that allow a community to filter out the bad grain.

Ohoni.6057:

and if they absolutely insist on the event ending after 15 minutes then you should succeed regardless of how much damage is done.

Wow. Just, wow. I’m not one to throw this word around all the time like some others, but god, do you sound entitled.

As much as one ranger can speed up a CoF p1 run by bringing spotter and frost spirit boosting the dps of the 4 other members, their own personal dps being not really all that great I don’t think you even know the meaning of “wrecking the place” if you felt a 5 ranger run was one of your fastest. Your head would probably explode if you had a good thief in your party.

Soloq, much fun, wow. Even though I was on the full team/winning side I felt so bored from this match that I didn’t even bother queueing for another round and just pressed alt F4 after this.

Ohoni.6057:

Solution: Remove Condition damage from the game. That seems to be the track we’re on anyways, While ideally condition damage could be fixed, moves like this one show that Power damage is intended to be the only appropriate build, so players accidentally putting any effort into Condition builds are just misleading themselves. Remove all conditions from the game and replace them with equivalent direct damage.

I’d argue that might be one of the only way to actually balance PVP in this game and get rid of the meta that was born post dumbfire, berserker stance immunity, cleansing ire etc. and the overall powercreep and sustain war (trying to get as much sustain as possible because condition will burn through builds that don’t have sustain)

This game has no trinity and is all about killing things with action mechanics. What are you asking for, to be able to “heal the mobs to death”? the fight has a timer and fails if not completed within said timer, if it isn’t obvious that dps matters in some way I don’t know how to spell it out to you.

Ohoni.6057:

No, it’s not the mechanics. I’ve had fights with relatively few people downed and they still end up terribly because they fail the DPS check. You could give everyone permanent Invulnerable and they would still fail it because the Knights have too much HP.

Get a build and gear that isn’t a leech build and we’ll talk about whether they are too hard or not. Not being able to get the achiev (six minutes to knightfall) is one thing, but not being able to kill all three at all and get into the holo fight? that’s because your map is filled with leeches.

You don’t need a whole group of 50 to down a kitten knight but you do need a group that isn’t filled with sentinel and rabid leeches.

Casmurro.9046:

But you can still run to the bone wall to make the barricades respawn without reseting alphard. Appearently ANet will keep patching alphard until it gets broken like the TA f/u tree.

Seems like one my jokes might turn into reality someday. Ever since alphard got patched into doing the new pull/instant explosion when a member doesn’t dodge, I felt like this path might end up someday like TA F/U in that it will get replaced by a living story instance for being too unpopular in pugs. After all, anet acted like it was too hard to revert the tree boss into the previous state, I don’t doubt their ability to say “we didn’t feel like fixing arah path 2 so here you get a new Aetherblade Mai Trin arah instance!”.
They act on metrics, and metrics will probably turn this path into something very unpopular among the pugs (but still run a lot in dungeon guilds) if it goes on like this.
Also the living story is now about dragons, it wouldn’t be surprising to see an arah living story path since arah isn’t necessarily about zhaitan (Path 3 is all about learning the method to free a minion from a dragon control for eg). And if they had to chose a path to cull among the four paths, path 2 would be the most obvious one. It’s also the most exploited for path selling.

I also bet a lot of the regulars will get cancer from reading my post. My condolences.

and you are probably not supposed to be at meele range all the time when fighting the knights.

If that was true (as an intent from anet) then it doesn’t work on all classes, for starter, and secondly, if the fight was intended to be ranged more than melee’d, then why did they not introduce any amount of threat or pressure onto ranged characters ? (unless you mean that afkrange should be a thing) heck, there shouldn’t be a fight in this game that is so trivialized by range that literally nothing can threaten you except for one single extremely telegraphed pull every 10 seconds that anyone could dodge. When you range the knights there is literally nothing that can even do any amount of noticeable damage. That makes for a rather mediocre encounter.
The knights aren’t the only boss trivialized by ranged weapons but I feel they are close to being the encounter with the least amount of threat to range users in this game. Even Ginva puts more pressure on range users and that’s saying something. Particularly as his pull is not a gigantic orange circle with a long build up and he reflects projectiles at times.

The melee vs range issue on the knight is that they don’t give enough incentive to melee unless you’re on a class with a particularly strong amount of block/evasive damage. What’s the incentive to take any sort of risk when you could almost afk the fight just pressing V and targeting from time to time. You don’t even have to move around much.

fishball.7204:

Cuz some classes have crazy mobility for orb running whereas others don’t (ie. imbalanced).

The funny thing about that is that they didn’t consider putting it in teamq, where you CAN control what classes are brought to the party, but not in soloq, where you can’t control anything (yelling that you don’t want to play in a team with two+ elementalists is not going to make the players change their characters). That imbalance is inherently worse for soloq than it could’ve been for teamq.

Also I wish I knew why people play staff ele in soloq. It can be good in a coordinated group but I never saw a staff build being anything other than free points for thieves in soloq. The sad thing about soloq is that you can often have an idea as to whether you will win or lose just looking at the classes and the weapon sets used in your group before the match even starts.

haviz.1340:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Found your problem right here.

Nothing auto attacks better than a warrior in melee range anyway.

You’re dead after 4-5 autoattack on a warrior. Healing signet is not strong enough this time.

Not that it really matters when all evasion (whirlwind, reckless dodge) and blocks (riposte) do damage along with your gap closing skills. Warrior might not have the best theoretical dps in the game but they sure are the most practical in certain circumstances.

Most difficult part of this patch is to not fall asleep while doing the achievs.

AkiraZero.8514:

More excuses man, you can easily dodge the majority of attacks, soak up some others and switch to range for a bit. People refuse to adapt and accept you cant just stand still hitting 1 all day long.
And while yes I do use mixtures of Knights/Clerics/Soldiers on my characters for WvW this only further proves that people still wont budge from the so called Zerker Warrior Meta they have become so used to.

I don’t think someone who plays the most faceroll class in the game (whirlwind, riposte, low cd, burst skill endu regen combined with fast weapon switching not to mention all the movements skills to go back into melee after backing from a series of auto) along with knight and soldier gear on said faceroll class to boot should try to teach anyone a lesson in this thread. Try to melee this on an ele or bomb kit engi and we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve done it melee on bomb kit engi without going down but I felt it was a waste of time more than anything else because the downtime on damage was just too high and the reward for being in melee and taking risks absolutely not worth anything. I’d probably do more damage just building for rifle ranged damage than having to use a sigil of energy in melee trying to hit with bombs.
Don’t even mention the grenade kit, it should be renamed as the suicide kit when used on the knights.

This fight is incredibly boring on engi, it’s either you do no damage bombing from time to time or you do some pathetic ranged damage while almost afking and only pressing V when the big bad circle appears which has the easiest tell to dodge in the whole game. The fact that I see so many in the zergs getting pulled by such an obvious tell gives me cancer.

The whole thing is incredibly bad design, one of the worst fight in the game. It’s either Guild Warriors if you want to have melee fun, or Guild Boredom if you’re ranging almost afk just pressing V on the big bad orange circle. There is literally no punishing attack at all for those who range which isn’t how a good fight should be. Even range should be punished in some way. Pressing V every 10 seconds is not enough pressure on ranged characters. The most challenging thing about the whole fight (and the holo) is to not fall asleep on your keyboard.

Content gameplay-wise 0/10
boring, uninspired. The fact that overflows fail the knight says a lot more about the average gw2 player (how can those zerg keep getting pulled all the time by one of the most heavily telegraphed aoe of the game?) than the quality or skill required to complete it.
too many achievs depends on random circumstances (finding yourself with the right people except that you don’t get to chose who you’re playing with in the open world).
mediocre rewards (the hour spent camping for, then killing the knight, then the holograms doesn’t even begin to compare to what you can gain just running 3 paths of a dungeon like AC) with almost no loot (the previous LA event was zergy and bad but at least the loot was good).
The fact that something like TTS is needed along with ferrying people through overflows (what a chore) and camping maps says a lot about the need for actual instanced content in this game, rather than forcing the players to try to circumvent the idea behind the open world by artificially managing their “instances” through overflows and clunky party mechanics. Get it, if you want good content you need instances. Open world doesn’t work.

Also, the biggest challenge to the knight and hologram fights is to not fall asleep on your keyboard.

story 1/10
I only gave it 1 point for the fact that we finally saw scarlet die and LA burn for good. I know letting villains do a speech while they are on their final death throes is cliché, but anet failed by not highlighting her motives more during the whole living story season which means that letting her explain herself during this last scene was the last way to save this sorry thing anet calls a story in my eyes, and they even failed at that by letting one of the most boring npc, braham, interrupt her with even more cliché hero speech (We’re tyrians blabla I wanted to punch him so hard when I heard that line). So we now know what Scarlet did but we still have zero actual clue as for the why. She wakes up a dragon because.. reasons.. great. 1 year of crappy story telling for this? are you guys for real.

The whole Living Story thing basically destroyed any potential guild wars 2 had to be a great MMO. The Ascalonian Catacombs revamp promised that we were going to see a revamp of a all the dungeons in this game, and I personally found the AC revamp to be much better than the previous incarnation of the dungeon (the boss fights are a lot more interesting). That potential went to trash when they got side tracked by the living story and let dungeons rot.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/chris-whiteside-on-the-lost-shores-and-beyond/
This is what they promised and will never deliver.
“Revamping all of our existing dungeons (Story and Explorable versions) through rebalance and overhauled encounters.”

AC was the one and only dungeon they even dared to give a look at.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/robert-hrouda-on-upcoming-changes-to-dungeon-mechanics/

Phase 2 of our dungeons evolution will see a lot of changes to bosses and enemies. We plan on taking a good, hard look at the health values and mechanics of our elites and bosses, and in turn how we reward players for their time investment and risk. This will include looking into every boss in our dungeons and seeing what we can do to enhance the gameplay experience in order to make more memorable and strategic encounters.

It has been a year since that whole press release was written. Everything in that press release is a lie.

Whole living story season : -2/10. Yes, negative scoring. Because overall the living story did more bad than good for the game. Some things, like the queen’s gauntlet, were decently okay, but things like resetting our fractal level for almost nothing (dailies 50 feel easier to complete than the old 48, some bosses have been made completely irrelevant like Ashym since the NPC are so overpowering him with the agony patch) making us grind again is a loss for literally no gain.

Revert the game to a previous state and act like none of this ever happened and it will already be ten times better off for it. Revert it to before the fractal patch, to before dumbfire, healing signet, berserker stance and all that jazz and both TPVP and PVE will be better off for it. Just admit your patches made the game worse for it. Pretty much most of the TPVP forum is criticism about changes you’ve made this past year, rather than the base game and mechanics. Pretty much most of the PVE players are fed up with fractals these days and a lot left the game or stopped running FOTM after the fractured patch. You can still save this game, just admit all the past year work was going into the wrong direction and annihilate it. Scarlet never happened.

Anet doesn’t have a group of testers competent enough to actually do something like kill the knights under 6 minutes, so they can’t actually comb through the bugs they introduce.

24 might stacks on a build like yours is like putting lipstick on a pig. And FGS without a wall to rush on or a large hitbox, in a pug that isn’t going to kill fast (and thus make stuff like blinkfgs kinda useless) is a bad weapon. The fact that you’re even mentioning FGS while talking about fractal 49 pugs.. I’d love to hear about which bosses you corner stacked with your fgs there. I’m sure you did a lot of fgs good on archdiviner and grawl.
You don’t seem to have much in the way of damage modifiers traits so like I said, you’re trying to compare a ricer tuned smart car to a ferrari. Your build has no damage, giving it 25 might stacks and fury will not make you comparable to a guardian that actually has a damage build no matter how you slice it.

I’ll stop here because any more time given to you is time purely wasted. The fact that you mentions “20k” as a big number or imply that guardians don’t have sustain.. the high frequency of 5 to 8K? you should take a look at sword auto it will be enlightening.

Machupo.1095:

I do more DPS than you

If that guardian was running meta, then no. Hell, no. Maybe when you can FGS things against a wall but I highly doubt that you had much opportunities to do that in a FOTM 49 pug out of all things.

He didn’t know what to answer…….

Probably didn’t want to argue with ignorance. Putting an actual effort into an argument with people like you is a waste of time. I would also be silent if I did just a random pug and didn’t care (which 99% of the time I pug anyhow, I don’t really try to filter pugs, often feels like a waste of time seeing the kind of zerkers I’ve seen in FOTM pugs), or just start a votekick and block you if you tried to whisper and the run was advertised as meta. Bottom line is that I’m not going to break a sweat convincing people who already made up their mind to PlayHowTheyWant.

Anyway, I’ve seen so many “melee only” pugs in arah where they almost all died on lupi during phase 2 except for one party member most of the time that I really don’t bother putting such requirements or zerk only requirement in my own LFGs. The fact is that most players are really bad and gear checking, AP checking, requiring specific tactics will not change that fact. Zerk only might work to get a decent AC or CoF pug but it completely breaks down on more serious content unless they’re carried by a mesmer (arah) or a seriously good guardian (fractals) because most zerkers pugs are far, far, far from being capable of handling a run the way a speedrun guild usually would.

lindstroem.3601:

Hopefully Skyhammer will last forever in SoloQ. Map mechanics are the perfect counter for the condition bunker meta. No more outsitting the damage on the node while the enemy (preferably glass cannons with direct damage) dies slowly to the applied conditions.

You do realize that skyhammer actually promotes heavily two of the most cancerous bunker builds of the game? They’re not condition based but there isn’t much you can do against a minion necro or decap built engie sitting on the skyhammer, and whoever controls the skyhammer wins the map. This is particularly true if you’re not playing warrior with a constant stream of stability. Minion necro sitting on the skyhammer are a serious cancer, their minion deals a lot of damage despite the necro being built like a tank and if you try to avoid the minions and leave the area in front of the gate you’re just asking to get feared out of the edges. And yet, if you don’t take this risk, you’re going to die (from the minions).

And again decap engie survives damage pretty well while being capable of killing people on this map without having to do actual damage (be it power or condition based) at all.

This map is cancer. I don’t usually care that much for cheese builds like decap engie but it brings a whole new meaning to the word cancer when they sit on the skyhammer.

DiamondMeteor.8345:

24/7 Rifle Warriors.

24/7 Staff Guardians.

Staff Elementalists.

Permakit Flamethrower Engineers.

Scepter/Dagger Necromancers.

24/7 Greatsword Mesmers.

24/7 Shortbow Thieves.

If you have a problem with Bearbows, these should also concern you to the same degree.

Also, just because someone rolls a Warrior or Guardian doesn’t always guarantee decent results. And stop pretending you are when you run your kittenty play-your-own bullkitten.

There are bads from every class but a lot more so from guardian and ranger and for a reason.

When was the last time you saw someone justify the use of a rifle by saying “I made a warrior because I wanted to be a rifleman”? Rangers more often than not justify the fact that they play ranger because they wanted to play with bows. The class inherently attracts some of the worst players, and it has been that way since time immemorial in MMORPGs, starting with “huntards” in WoW (and again, a reputation earned not because the class is bad (it’s not), but because it attracts a certain type of undesirable player.).
As for guardians it’s filled to the brim with bads in pugs because the class attracts those who fancy themselves as tank or healers a lot more than the other classes.

When you pug you don’t always want to waste time giving a chance to a community that is almost solely filled with bads (like the ranger and guardian pugs) which makes it just a lot better to kick them than to filter the 1 out of 10 ranger that is any sort of decent.

Tatsuo.1478:

21. Anet attention to pvp ~1%, pve 99% (with WvW).

If only that was true.. the pve side isn’t a lot better off when you look at the dire lack of solid and fun instanced content. If they put 99% more effort into PVE than they did for PVP it wouldn’t suck as much as it does now. We’ve been doing the same broken dungeons+FOTM for more than a year now.

spoj.9672:

if you can dodge jump

Is it even possible to be unable to? pressing two keys at the same time isn’t rocket science.

Leeto.1570:

Too late for this, they said use up your glory boosters and i did.
In what way it would be fair to me that you didnt use your glory boosters? Will i get my 200+ glory boosters now back if they decide to give reward for them?
If you dont use them that means you dont need them, if you dont need them then dont cry about them beeing removed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality